Translation: Eamonn Bell (rev. November 2022)
[pp. 94-95]
1) The postulated existence of structural atoms, or of morphemes, semantemes, graphemes, mythemes etc. according to the terminology of Levi-Strauss is an affirmation of the structuralist principle conceived of as an atomic theory of the human sciences, and is applied here more specifically to art. The Theory of Information is advanced here as an intersection point between structuralist theory and dialectic theory. It borrows from (or it lends to?) the structuralist theory the idea of an atom, the idea of the model, and the idea of structure as the sum of the constraints governing the object of its analysis. It borrows from the dialectic theory the figure–ground opposition, essential to the idea of Form (“Gestalt”) and the process of iteration which consists, after constructing a model, of tackling its insufficiency in a struggle over and over from the beginning, where the picture emerges, little by little, of the basic complexity of everything.
2) The method of charting brings the concept of operational rigour as a new philosophical category that substitutes, inter alia, for the concept of exactitude. The idea of the program appears as an algorithm of the mind [de l’esprit] itself. It is a formalisation of the steps of thought, and the genial stupidity of machines constrains their user to suppose nothing else as evident that cannot be duly reconstructed by the computer, as a function of the existence of technical elements perfectly available [to it] as a prioris. It is the perfect expression of a neo-cartesianism of the machine.
3) Flowcharts of machines for creativity foreground the idea of hierarchy of order and the idea of level of analysis. Machines for writing poetry situate themselves sometimes at the level of words, where they perform a simple lettrism; sometimes on the level of phonemes, and they create ultra-lettrist poetry; sometimes on the level of semantemes or phrases, and they make permutational literature; sometimes, even further still, they play with the arithmetic of plots in permutational novels.
4) Creative machines force us to confront, as a necessary problem, the conflict between Markovian structure, on the short scale, and syntactic structure, on the long scale. According to Markovian structures, the more or less rigorous laws of assembling elements brings about localised “patterns”‘; syntactic structures, on the contrary, express [95] the fact that the totality (the figure, the form) determines the adjoining parts in their outline, independently of their elements.
5) The definition of Beauty is originally that of a statistic of the Beautiful. It is a type of response that the estheticians have hardly considered up until now; the idea of measure is in conflict with the idea of the transcendence of the Beautiful advanced by the philosophers. Beauty finds itself linked to society as a intersection-point of a large number of individual thoughts.
6) The esthetician, a being who is quite socially disadvantaged, for a long time subject to a terrible inferiority complex, since he discourses on what others make, finds himself promoted to the same level as these artists that he formerly [merely] spoke about. It is he who provides the elements of programs to introduce into the repertoire of machines; he who determines the hierarchy of the levels to adopt therein. The chars above make precise that every analytical machine can serve as a synthetic machine, that is to say as a source of artworks of which the aesthetician will be, in any case, if not the author proper – alas the author disappears from the work – at least the manager and the responsable.
7) A final concept is imposed by the mechanological reasoning that constrains us to consider a dimension of the external world that has been unfortunately neglected until now. It the notion of the “machine capacity”, linked to the imposition of order on the universe – or on a fragment of it – by a series of enunciable processes that possess a certain complexity. One may call “creative methods” all these procedures that contribute to accelerating these processes of the rearrangement of the world.